Peggy Noonan

Half a century ago William F. Buckley wrote a small gem of a book called “Cruising Speed,” about a single action-packed week in his life as an editor and writer. I’ve just had a Buckley-like week—at Purdue University in Indiana to speak with students, then back to New York to interview Henry Kissinger for the White House Historical Association, and then on to make the main speech to the Al Smith Dinner, the Archdiocese of New York’s big annual bipartisan charitable fundraiser. In all these venues the same theme emerged. People are worried about America and the world.

Purdue has a strong sense of community and its students are quick, affable and penetrating. I met with about 70 of them Monday for questions and answers in a political-science class at Beering Hall, and almost all their questions betrayed a perplexity about America. They were worried that our political polarization might prove fatal, that we might lose our democracy. They see signs of it. A student asked how Trump supporters can believe, after all the investigations and judicial decisions, that Joe Biden lost and he won. I said there are a lot of parts to that. Americans have always loved conspiracism, it’s in our DNA. When I was a kid it was the CIA killed JFK, Dwight Eisenhower is a communist, fluoride in the water is a plot. In our time this tendency has been magnified and weaponized by the internet, where there’s always a portal to provide you proof.

Part of it is American orneriness—people enjoy picking a fight, holding a grudge, being the only person who really gets what’s going on. Part of it is the sheer cussed fun of being obstinate. Some of it is committed and sincere—an ineradicable belief that established powers like to pull the wool over our eyes, a belief made more stubborn because sometimes they do. In the case of politicians it can be a mystery how sincere they are and how much is opportunism. If the locals say Trump won and I’m running for office, then Trump won! The only thing I could think of to help was keeping lines of communication up and the conversation going.

Later, in a “fireside chat” with Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, a student asked about something I’d written years ago—that presidential nominees always look alone up there on stage, like lone cowboys acting out some kind of personal destiny. I said yes, it had been a while since a candidate looked as if he had an ideological movement behind him, a fully thought-through political philosophy that propelled supporters. Such a movement implies mass, a force that came up from the people. Mr. Daniels said movements get things done; they will political change into being. He threw up a quote from my first book, 32 years ago, that said liberals in the media don’t dislike conservatives.

That was true when I wrote it, I said, but it seems less true now. In the seven years since Donald Trump came down the escalator, mainstream media has changed its nature. I understand why they thought they had to stop Mr. Trump—our big media come largely from New York, which had known him for more than 30 years and saw him not as the commanding presence on “The Apprentice” but as a con man who always seemed to operate one step ahead of the law. They felt they had to oppose him, but that very opposition left them not “reporting” but becoming what only some of them wanted to be, openly activist and of the left. This too contributed to polarization: people who more or less used to trust them to throw the ball straight no longer do, and find other news sources, some of which are specious indeed.

I went home to New York and, on Wednesday night, to interview Mr. Kissinger. With a book out and crises brewing he’s on the scene and, at 99, treated as what he is, a legend. I think here Henry’s friend Bill Buckley might have fun and call him the biggest thing since Bismarck. Mr. Kissinger is grave about the current moment. The evening was informally off the record, but I don’t think he’d mind my saying I asked him about broad feelings of anxiety about the world. Is it unrealistic to be experiencing this moment as uniquely dangerous? During his answer—no, he doesn’t think it unrealistic—he reflected that he’s been thinking a lot about World War I and how the leaders of the nations engaged in that conflict had no idea, at the beginning, the magnitude of the losses coming, that they just stumbled in and stumbled on.

His advice seemed to echo what we discussed at Purdue: In tough times, keep all lines of communication up and operating. You never know what might come in on the wires. Keep the conversation going.

On Thursday night, I gave the main speech at the Al Smith Dinner. A little more than 600 people gathered in the Park Avenue Armory, every politician of note in the state and city, and business figures and philanthropists, many on the broad dais in white tie and tails or gowns. The trick at the dinner is to be funny as possible while training your fire equally on both parties. The assumption is everyone’s better when they’re laughing. I did my best. Chuck Schumer’s been in Congress so long that medically he’s considered a pre-existing condition. Kevin McCarthy told me at the last national prayer breakfast that Jesus loves America best, that’s why the Bible is in English.

Will President Biden run for re-election? He’s showing telltale signs of aging. Held a state dinner and insisted it start at 5 p.m. so he could get the early-bird special. Afterward he invited the visiting prime minister to go upstairs and watch “Hogan’s Heroes.” Then he spent a half hour trying to rewind Netflix. A month from now he turns 80 but the White House has been playing down any celebrations. Internal memos about it have such a high security classification that copies have been found at Mar-a-Lago. But personally I prefer age to some of the younger congressmen and -women, who are, basically, airheads. I’ve interviewed them. They think Machiavelli is a clothing designer. They think bilateral and trilateral are muscles you work in the gym.

And there’s Ted Cruz. When Ted ran for president, he called me and asked me for advice. I said, “Ted, just be yourself.” That was mean of me.

Then there’s Mike Pence, a good man. But hearing him give a speech is proof that the dead are trying to contact us.

And so my Buckley-like week: the questioning young at Purdue, the wisdom of a great statesman in New York, and on to the Park Avenue Armory for the Catholic Church raising money for kids and immigrants by teasing itself and others. A good thing in life is not to get jaded but to see that even in a world of trouble life is moving, stimulating, even splendid, that you’re lucky to be here and doing what you’re doing. I think Bill Buckley would have enjoyed himself.

Public pronouncements aren’t commensurate with the gravity of the Ukraine situation. They’ve gotten too informal, off-the-cuff and shallow.

Russia continues its missile barrage against Ukrainian cities. The Crimean bridge was daringly taken out, delivering Vladimir Putin a real blow, and within hours Ukraine was tauntingly unveiling a postage stamp depicting the ruined span. The Nord Stream pipeline has been sabotaged. Each side blames the other, but either way Europe is braced for a long dark winter. And both sides are either threatening or speculating aloud about the use of nuclear weapons.

President Biden has taken to publicly comparing the current moment to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From reported remarks at a New York City Democratic fundraiser: “We have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going. . . . We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy.” Vladimir Putin is “not joking.”

If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. JFK wasn’t at fundraisers in October 1962, and when he spoke it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.

Since the tanks first moved in February, one of this column’s preoccupations has been the tone, volume and swiftness of the declarations, tweets, one-liners and ad libs that followed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the beginning, had to establish that he and his country would fight: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” The West in turn had to make clear it would resist this brute violation of international law, the violent invasion of a sovereign nation. If it didn’t, it would be accepting the idea that the law counts for nothing; the world is a jungle where the feral have the upper hand.

Since then, and as the stakes got higher, leaders have become all too casual—unserious and sloppy. Part of it is social media, on which the whole world is hooked. Ambassadors launch taunting tweets like rockets and get high-fives instead of irradiated craters. I can’t get the phrases “possible nuclear war” and “let’s do snark” to go together in my head. Many others can.

What’s needed is a serious, weighty, textured document that reflects the gravity of the moment we’re in, a full Oval Office address that doesn’t emote but speaks rationally to a nation of thoughtful people. A big definitional statement. Where are we? Are we communicating with the Kremlin? How should the American people be thinking about all this?

There are times in life and diplomacy when silence must be maintained as circumstances evolve and new options emerge. But we’re not maintaining silence. As for the efficacy of thoughtfulness, sometimes it can cool things down or slow them down. If we’re traveling toward Armageddon the slow route is best.

Here I jump to Mr. Putin himself. It’s hard to imagine a peaceful resolution while he retains power. It is possible conversations have begun among members of the institutions that might most effectively move against him—the state intelligence apparatus, the military, even the cabinet. If they are talking, it would be going like this: Mr. Putin himself drove the war, which was a bad idea badly executed; it likely can’t be won by conventional means; the use of nuclear or chemical weapons would create a physical danger to, and reputational disaster for, Russia; the Ukraine adventure has stressed the Russian economy and strained its political stability; the people don’t want it—not the elites seeing their worlds constrict, the middle seeing their aspirations disrupted, the hinterland folks whose sons are being sacrificed.

A veteran observer this week said Mr. Putin is a strongman who is now a weak man. That sort, he implied, can’t continue.

When Nikita Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, his adult son, Sergei, was keeping a diary. Twenty-four years later, when the diaries were published, Sergei spoke to Felicity Barringer of the New York Times.

Khrushchev, who was 70 in 1964, had embarrassed the Kremlin in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when his aggression and bluster were followed by retreat. He first caught wind of a plot when a bodyguard for a former Politburo member phoned and warned Sergei that the bodyguard’s boss, the head of the KGB, the communist party secretary and two current Politburo members were planning a coup. Nikita Khrushchev didn’t believe it but asked that his friend President Anastas Mikoyan be told. Later, at his dacha on the Black Sea, he received a call: There would be an emergency meeting in Moscow, his presence was necessary. Khrushchev suddenly realized he’d been seeing odd things—a ship hovering near his beach, bodyguards outside his usual detail.

At the Politburo meeting the coup leaders accused him of mismanagement, nepotism and tactlessness. He admitted he was rude but disputed the other points. At a second meeting he accepted his fate. The official news agency Tass reported he was retiring due to poor health and advanced age. He lived out his life gardening, airbrushed from historical photos, and died in 1971. In time, almost perversely, he told Mikoyan what happened was proof of the progress he’d instituted. Would anyone have dared tell Stalin to resign? “There wouldn’t be anything left of us.”

More recently, in August 1991, was the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. He was at his Black Sea house when his communications were cut off and he was placed under arrest. The Warsaw Pact countries were starting to break free. The KGB and the military didn’t like Gorbachev’s approach and said they feared the Soviet Union was next. They rolled tanks into Moscow, seized state television and announced Gorbachev was leaving for health reasons. Massive crowds gathered in the streets opposing the coup, and the pro-democracy figure Boris Yeltsin took to the top of a tank to urge resistance. The army broke, the KGB backed down, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. But Moscow was Yeltsin’s now. A few months later, on Christmas Day, Gorbachev stepped down. Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union over. It would be Russia now, Russia again.

In his farewell speech Gorbachev said he opposed the “dismembering” of what had been the previous Soviet state, and warned of danger ahead for the countries carved away. Six years later Yeltsin appointed a new head of the domestic arm of the intelligence service, a young man named Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin has dismantled or defanged some of the institutions that might go up against him. He likely has things pretty tightly wired. Unlike the KGB when it faced the protests of the Gorbachev coup, he wouldn’t likely shrink from bloodshed. Khrushchev was a fully rational actor, as was Gorbachev, as apparently were those who opposed them. We cannot be certain Mr. Putin is.

And Mr. Putin has the benefit of knowing how the two previous coup attempts ended. He’s probably made a deep study of both. And of course he lived through Gorbachev in 1991, as a KGB officer, though later he insisted he resigned when it began.

We’ll be helping dissidents only if we show now seriousness and sobriety and gravity, and repeat again the old Cold War distinction: We are against the Russian government’s actions but feel only respect and regard for the people of Russia, with whom we only want peace.

If you have been observing the Georgia U.S. Senate campaign closely and you are unusually straightforward and eloquent you would say of Herschel Walker what John Ellis said Wednesday in his newsletter:

“Walker shouldn’t be a candidate for the United States Senate. He’s not qualified. He won’t know what to do when (and if) he gets to Washington. He’s only on the ticket because former President Trump endorsed him. The moment he becomes a liability for Trump, Trump will cut him loose. So will everyone else. No one cares about Herschel Walker in GOP circles. . . . If Georgia Republicans could replace him on the ballot today, they would do so in a nano-second. They can’t. It’s too late.”

Mr. Ellis believes, however, that Mr. Walker could still win: energy prices up, inflation untamed, an out-of-control southern border, and a federal debt that this week reached a historic and somewhat harrowing $31 trillion. People fear recession. They won’t want to back the current cast of political characters, they’ll want to throw them out.

I’d add that voters don’t expect much. They’ve had their own imperfect lives, and they long ago lost any assumption that political leaders were more upstanding than they. We are in the postheroic era of American politics. What voters want is someone who sees the major issues as they do. Conservatives especially see America’s deep cultural sickness and wonder if the country is cratering before our eyes. In such circumstances personal histories don’t count as once they did.

But I see the Walker story differently and expect a different outcome.

Here I must tell you what you know, that the avowedly pro-life Senate candidate is accused of paying for the abortion of a former girlfriend, whose identity has not been revealed but who provided the Daily Beast substantiating evidence. Mr. Walker denied it, said he doesn’t know the woman and he sends checks to lots of people. The woman soon after came forward and said he should remember me, I gave birth to one of his children.

Explosive. But I think Republican strategists misunderstand the scandal, or miss the heart of it. It isn’t really about abortion or hypocrisy. It is about children born and the father says to the mother: You can raise it by yourself or you can abort it but I won’t help you raise it and act as a father. That is the story, that Walker is accused of abandoning his little kids, and it came from his son, Christian, 23, a conservative activist, who made the furious videos that blew the story up. That is the aspect Christian focused on: “My father . . . had all these random kids across the country, none of whom he raised. . . . Family values people: He has four kids—four different women—wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women. . . . You have no idea what me and my mom have survived.”

Voters who would easily forgive abortion or running around or bad breakups or divorce are less likely to give a pass on that, on four children left alone by their father, the rich handsome former football star and candidate for Senate. Christian Walker’s pain is a common one. The U.S. Census Bureau found in 2021 that 25% of American children are raised in households without their father. In Georgia there are more than 261,000 households with children under 18, a female head and no spouse or partner present.

That’s a lot of people. All of them would likely take this part of the story more to heart.

Republicans can say it’s an October surprise, a well-timed oppo drop. Mr. Walker himself says it shows how desperate Democrats are to hold the seat, they’ll smear you with anything. His supporters note the incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, has had his own personal embarrassments, with an ex-wife who accused him of trying to run over her foot in an argument. He’s just a “great actor,” she says. But that’s the kind of thing that impresses people who want to stick with you anyway. I’m not sure it moves anyone else.

Donald Trump is the reason Herschel Walker won the primary, but the Republican establishment in Washington was part of it. They looked at Mr. Walker and thought: fame, football star. He’ll raise tons of money. He will need a lot of help—he’s a political neophyte—but that will mean more jobs for high-priced consultants. Nothing wrong with that! And there were the maybes. Maybe he could help heal the Trump rift in the party. Maybe establishment support itself helps heal the rift. Maybe Mr. Walker could become the candidate who can seal the deal with minority voters, a guy who says by his very presence, “You have a home in this party.” Republicans actually do want to reach out, to include, to expand their base. But in this case it made them insane, it made them ignore what was obvious. Only a year ago the Associated Press was reporting Walker’s ex-wife Cindy Grossman, Christian’s mother, feared that he’d kill her and had to get a protective order against him. He had been accused of stalking and making violent threats against ex-girlfriends. Ms. Grossman said he’d held a gun to her head and threatened to blow her brains out. All this was known when everyone decided to back him.

Mr. Walker has spoken and written of his mental-health struggles, and he deserves sympathy. No one takes a sarcastic tone when noting that football-related brain injuries may have played a role in his adult life.

The Washington Post reported this week that national GOP leaders are behind Mr. Walker, but local leaders in Georgia feel “unease.” He gave a rousing speech for Mr. Trump at the 2020 GOP convention and maybe it took some guts, because it’s never been easy to be black and conservative. But he is a wholly untested newcomer to professional politics. The Post quoted former DeKalb County GOP Chairman Lane Flynn, who bottom-lined it: “The question going forward is how transactional is the average voter going to be?” If you’re sincerely pro-life, how does the Walker story reflect on the pro-life movement?

Seth Weathers, a longtime Georgia GOP strategist and state director of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, said, “I warned everyone I knew that this was a dumb idea,” referring to Mr. Walker’s nomination. Then, poignantly, “We could have had Gary Black.” Mr. Black was the state’s veteran agriculture commissioner, and before the Senate primary he mostly won landslides. He was a farmer, and he backed Mr. Trump. But he wasn’t the exciting choice, he wouldn’t blow up the money machine, and there was nothing dramatic about him. Why not throw the long ball?

It was political malfeasance all the way down. I understand why Republicans want to win back the Senate, and I hope they do. But they need to learn, again, that you need to be more serious than this, you can’t be so lacking in gravity when it comes to someone who may help decide Ukraine policy. You can’t be so frivolous and lacking in weight.

My hunch is they’re about to learn a lesson. Maybe it’s ultimately better that they learn it, again, and unmistakably.

In October it will be 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis, which has been called the most dangerous crisis in recorded history. The Soviet Union had secretly placed missiles in a base in Cuba; the U.S. discovered them through secret aerial photographs. What would President John F. Kennedy do, less than two years into his presidency and 1½ since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion? It is a famous story told in books, movies and monographs, but it bears another look and deeper reflection as Vladimir Putin threatens nuclear use in Ukraine.

Weeks ago Ukraine’s top military chief warned that there is “a direct threat of the use . . . of tactical nuclear weapons by the Russian armed forces.” Gen. Valery Zaluzhny wrote: “It’s also impossible to completely rule out possibility of the direct involvement of the world’s leading countries in a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, in which the prospect of World War III is already directly visible.”

What can we learn from what happened 60 years ago? The JFK Library website has transcripts, tapes and documents of White House deliberations as the crisis played out. What strikes you as you read and listen is the desperate and essential fact that they were groping in the darkness to keep the world from blowing up.

From the transcript of a White House meeting the morning of Oct. 16, the first day of the 13-day crisis:

Secretary of State Dean Rusk: “Mr. President, this is a, of course, a [widely?] serious development. It’s one that we, all of us, had not really believed the Soviets could, uh, carry this far.”

JFK asked why the Russians would do this. Gen. Maxwell Taylor suggested they weren’t confident of their long-range nuclear weapons and sought placement of shorter-range ones. Rusk thought it might be that Nikita Khrushchev lives “under fear” of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey and wants us to taste the same anxiety.

U.S. officials knew where most of the missiles and launchers were in Cuba, but not where the nuclear warheads were, or even if they’d arrived.

Should the U.S. attack the bases? If so, should it warn the Soviets first?

JFK: “Warning them, uh, it seems to me, is warning everybody. And I, I obviously—you can’t sort of announce that in four days from now you’re going to take them out. They may announce within three days they’re going to have warheads on ’em. If we come and attack they’re going to fire them. Then what’ll we do?”

You can hear the tension in the voices, and you can hear them because JFK secretly taped the deliberations, as he taped many conversations. No one knows why; historians have evinced a pronounced lack of interest in the question.

But it’s good he did, because it allows us to see decision-making played out at the highest level and with the highest possible stakes. Seemingly small things tell you worlds about general mood and approach. When JFK called to brief Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister said it might encourage the Soviets to withdraw the weapons if actions were taken to “help the Russians save face.” He offered to “immobilize our Thor missiles here in England” temporarily. JFK said he’d bring the idea forward. This was the West working to defuse things and encourage constructive action. Conceivably, were it discovered, Macmillan could have paid a political price for this at home; he never mentions that.

As the political scientist Graham Allison has noted, JFK was focused on big, strategic nuclear weapons. He didn’t know and couldn’t have known that Khrushchev had already sent smaller, tactical nukes to Cuba, under a Soviet commander who was on the ground there. If JFK had bombed the missile sites instead of using naval blockades and creative diplomacy, he might have unleashed what he was trying to prevent.

In the end, of course, Khrushchev withdrew the missiles. JFK, who had previously admitted to him that the Bay of Pigs was a mistake, repeated a promise not to invade Cuba. He secretly promised, too, that the U.S. would get its missiles out of Turkey.

But the story doesn’t end there. Eight months later, in June 1963, Kennedy gave a speech in which he described how the crisis had convinced him that the entire Cold War must be rethought. His speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, told me years later it was the “most important” speech he’d ever worked on. I saw in his eyes he meant the greatest, and he was right.

The nature of war has changed, Kennedy said. We can’t continue with great powers having huge nuclear arsenals and possibly resorting to their use: “A single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.” A major nuclear exchange could extinguish the world.

To believe peace is impossible is to believe war inevitable, and if that is so then mankind is doomed. “We need not accept that view.” No government is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in every virtue. America and the Soviet Union are “almost unique among the major world powers” in that “we have never been at war with each other.”

If we can’t resolve all our differences, we can at least turn to common interests. “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Importantly, there was this: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” Choosing that path would be evidence of a “collective death-wish for the world.” That is why U.S. military forces are “disciplined in self-restraint” and our diplomats “instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”

He said talks would soon begin in Moscow toward a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. He vowed to act as if it were already in place.

Kennedy’s insight that nuclear weapons changed the facts of human history was shared by Ronald Reagan. Like Kennedy, he respected Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Reagan said, privately and publicly, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He had been shocked, years before his presidency, to spend a day at Norad and absorb all the implications of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. As president his way would be stark candor coupled with increased strength and no sudden moves. Between 1982 and 1985 three Soviet leaders died, but when Reagan got a partner he could work with, Mikhail Gorbachev, he attempted, at Reykjavik in 1986, to abolish nuclear weapons outright. Later they achieved a historic arms-control agreement.

What lessons might diplomats infer from all this? Don’t be afraid of groping your way in the darkness. Stay fearful of—and focused on—nuclear weapons. Take chances. And don’t be so sure of continued good luck. We’ve been lucky for 77 years. We’re used to the worst thing not happening. But it could, and may.

You have to keep trying. You can’t rest on luck built by others.

Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine must be received soberly, if for no other reason than that leaders occasionally do what they say they’ll do. There are reasons beyond that. He has lost hardware, soldiers, ground and face. He is cornered and escalating, increasing the odds of mistake and miscalculation.

Great care is needed now, the greatest possible. Wednesday this week came the famous (though not first) threat of nuclear use. In a rare speech to the nation from the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said: “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” He announced referendums in occupied areas that will presumably result in declarations that they are Russian territory. Ukraine’s attempts to push back Russian troops can then be defined as an invasion of Russia, which Mr. Putin must defend by any and all means.

He also called up 300,000 reservists. There is reason to doubt this will appreciably improve Russia’s position. The motley new troops will be blended over months into an army that doesn’t work. This is one reason we can’t be certain Mr. Putin will lean most heavily on conventional methods of war.

Russia is long thought to have about 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S., with delivery systems ranging from mobile ground-based launchers to ships. These weapons are smaller than strategic weapons, with shorter range and lower yield. The Times of London provided a map with concentric circles to show potential blast radiuses if a tactical nuke were trained on London—it was like something out of 1958. Such weapons are built to take out specific targets in specific areas without widespread destruction. But yes, radioactive debris in Ukraine would waft this way or that with wind currents, possibly west toward Poland, possibly toward Mr. Putin’s own troops. Not that he’d care; not that they’d think he’d care.

American diplomats have believed Mr. Putin will never use tactical nukes because he’d fear the price. But they can’t know that, especially if they’re unclear what price they’d exact. They hope Russian officials in the command structure would thwart such an order, but they can’t be certain of that either. They believe they can’t bow to nuclear blackmail because that would bring a whole new order of international chaos with it, and that’s true. All the more reason the greatest care is required now.

The atmosphere around Mr. Putin appears increasingly fevered. His enemies keep falling from windows and boats. This week the former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, an erstwhile Putin supporter, reportedly fell down “a series of flights of stairs,” resulting, according to the announcement on Telegram, in “injuries incompatible with life.” Antiwar demonstrations broke out in 37 Russian cities, according to the Associated Press. “Send Putin to the trenches,” they chanted in Moscow. Wednesday’s address was scheduled for Tuesday, postponed and given 13 hours late. Airline seats out of Moscow are famously full and not round trips. There are reports Mr. Putin himself is bypassing his generals and sending direct orders to the field.

Maybe he’s finding that fewer of his countrymen than he’d supposed share his mystical vision of a greater imperial Russia restored; maybe it’s just him and 50 intellectuals. Maybe that will intensify his bitterness and nihilism.

But all this speaks of growing disorder around him. His most eloquent critics and foes in the West call him a liar and murderer, and he is, but it’s worse now than they think. This isn’t Syria; it’s not the joy of poisoning your enemies or jailing dissidents. Ukraine is the ballgame for him. The whole meaning of his adult life is his war with the West, and this is the battlefield. He is about to turn 70, closer to the end than the beginning. He alone drove this thing and he’ll drive it into the ground because, I believe, he doesn’t care anymore, and he can’t lose.

All this is apart from other unconventional means of trouble at his disposal, from cyber and infrastructure attacks to fighting near nuclear reactors, as has already occurred. There is the economic and political turmoil that will follow his cutting natural-gas supplies to Western Europe.

I spent the spring and summer reading about World War I, all the big, classic histories, but drilling down even into the memoirs of the tutor of the czarevitch in the last years of Romanov rule. I’ve done such regimens before. I like reading about epic catastrophes: It’s encouraging. We got through that. We’ll get through the next thing.

It reminded me of the obvious, that peacetime governments rarely know exactly what to focus on in real time. They don’t like to think imaginatively about the worst. The leaders of the nations that would go to war in August 1914 were certain in July that there wouldn’t be a war—there couldn’t be, because everyone had too much to lose. Tensions had risen in the past and been soothed. There was the sense of sleepwalking toward war, and indeed a great modern history of the era is called “The Sleepwalkers.” They stumbled in. Paul Fussell, in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” wrote of the horror of the trenches and the hopeless charges into the new weapon called the machine gun, and saw irony. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The means are always “melodramatically disproportionate” to the presumed ends.

I hope our leaders are groping toward something, some averting process, maybe along the lines of French President Emmanuel Macron’s urging for a negotiated peace. What shouldn’t fully settle in is the idea that conceding the need to pursue every avenue is somehow letting down the side, and showing insufficient fervor for the Ukraine, that has so moved the world.

I sense people are afraid of looking afraid. But when a bad man who’s a mad man says he’ll do something terrible, it’s not wrong to think about every way you can to slow or stop him.

We live in a funny world that’s at bottom anxious and sad and yet insists on a carapace of cheer, or at least distraction. We’re losing a sense of tragedy.

The other night the great British playwright Tom Stoppard spoke movingly, in New York, of how nations often don’t get the governments they deserve. Russia, he said, is a landmass alive with history and literature and occupied by a people whose suffering and endurance echo through the ages. And look what they’re stuck with. Tolstoy biographer A.N. Wilson, in his recent autobiography, says something similar, describing Russia as an ancient “God-bearing” people whose meaning is located in survival.

If you think of it this way, it’s all the more tragic. Good people all around, bad trouble here and looming.

I’m not a prophet, and I don’t know what to do. But I know the size of this war and this time in history. It’s not the same old, not the usual. It feels like a turning point. We have to get serious in some new way.

“For the British people, Victoria was more than an individual, more even than the queen,” Robert K. Massie wrote in “Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.” “She was—and had been as long as most of them could remember—a part of the fabric of their lives. She embodied history, tradition, government, and the structure and morality of their society. They trusted her to remain there, always to do her duty, always to give order to their lives. She did not disappoint them. In return, they gave her their allegiance, their devotion—and their esteem.”

We all knew it was coming yet it feels like a blow. A mighty presence has passed, one who meant more to us perhaps than we’d noticed.

The reign of Queen Elizabeth II surpassed Victoria’s (1837-1901) in September 2015. For the vast majority of her people, she was the only monarch they had ever known. Her life spanned almost a century, through wars, through empire and its decline, through every cultural and political shift. And in all that time she was a symbol of continuity, stability and soundness.

There will be, mostly but not only in Britain, a surge of sentiment as if a big page has been turned and we very much don’t want it to turn—we don’t want to get to the end of that book, don’t want to close it.

Her virtues were old-school virtues.

• She accepted her life with grace. When she became queen at 25 she recognized it as her duty and destiny. She was a member of a particular family and the heir to a particular throne. She had a duty to the people of her country and would sacrifice a great deal—privacy, leisure, some faint sense of control of one’s life—to meet it. She represented the permanent over the merely prevalent.

Sally Bedell Smith, in her great biography “Elizabeth the Queen: the Life of a Modern Monarch,” quoted the British journalist Rebecca West, who observed that the monarch is “the emblem of the state, the symbol of our national life, the guardian of our self-respect.” But it was more than that, too; you didn’t have to be English to appreciate what she was doing.

• She did what she said she’d do. After her father’s death, she met with the leaders of Britain at St. James’s Palace. In a clear voice she declared: “By the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. . . . I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples. . . . I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.” She did, and everyone watching over the years could see it.

• She gave it everything she had. She was conscientious, serious-minded, responsible. Every day but Christmas and Easter Sunday and wherever she was, she directed her energies to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers, Foreign Office cables, budget documents, intelligence reports. She was deskbound as long as needed, often working into the evening. After that the private audiences, public events, consultations. She didn’t flag.

• It wasn’t about her. The important thing was the institution, the monarchy, and its responsibility to its subjects. She wanted to be a queen the country adhered to and was proud of, so she maintained dignity. She knew her role. She didn’t show moods or take sides, never tried to win the crowd, didn’t attempt to establish a reputation for wit or good nature. She was in her public dealings placid, as a great nation’s queen would be. “She has been, as someone once said, the light above politics,” Ms. Smith said Thursday on CNN. “Even when I’d watch her at royal events she would hesitate to clap or smile because she didn’t want to show favoritism. She has wanted to be a force for everybody and a glue for the nation, and that sort of exterior has been important.”

• She was a woman of faith. At her 1953 coronation in Westminster Abbey, the most important moment happened outside of television range. It was when the archbishop of Canterbury poured holy oil and anointed the new queen, “making a sign of the cross on the palms of each of her hands, her forehead, and exposed upper chest,” Ms. Smith wrote. (Victoria hadn’t allowed her archbishop to touch her chest.) Elizabeth felt the anointing “sanctified her before God to serve her people.” Her friends said it was the anointing, not the crowning, that made her queen.

• She understood her role. She was the longest reigning monarch in British history, a continuous thread to the past. Decades passed but the thread remained and never broke, which suggested things would hold together, and everything in the end would be all right. She understood that in the tumultuous 20th century the idea of continuity itself was a gift to her country. She had to be reliable, and was.

• Because of all this, when she entered the room, Britain entered the room. Majesty entered, something old and hallowed and rich in meaning, something going back to tribes that painted themselves blue and forward to the Magna Carta. It was mysterious, but I saw it once: She entered a hall full of voices and suddenly, silence. It was only a few years ago, but I realized that in a time when personal stature is mindlessly thrown off or meanly taken, hers had only increased.

There is something so touching in the way she had begun in the past few years to laugh and smile so much, to show her joy, her simple pleasure in being there. You saw it in pictures taken this week, which showed her seeing off an old prime minister and seeing in a new one, wearing a plaid skirt and long gray cardigan, holding her cane and laughing merrily. I think of how moved I was by the clip a few months ago of the queen and Paddington Bear, in which she divulged what she kept in her purse—a marmalade sandwich. The royal band outside struck up Freddie Mercury, and she kept time with a spoon on her teacup. I didn’t know when I saw it why it moved me so much, and realized: because my mind was saying don’t go old friend, we’ll miss you.

The great of Britain have been talking for years about how sad it will be when she departs. They’re about to be taken aback by how deep and pervasive the mourning is. Britain is braced for hard times; people won’t easily lose such a figure of stability and continuity. “King Charles” will sound strange on the tongue.

And they loved her.

Now I am imagining the royal funeral, the procession, the carriages of state going slowly down the mall, the deep crowds on each side. The old will come in their chairs and the crowd will kindly put them in front, the best view, to wave goodbye to their friend, with whom they had experienced such history together.

Requiescat in pace, Elizabeth Regina.

London

I am not sentimental about the special relationship between the U.S. and Britain but fully support it. Nations have to look out for their own interests, but in a dangerous world you keep old friends close. We came from them: The Magna Carta flowed into our Declaration, the English and Scottish Enlightenments helped form our Founders. We are English-speaking peoples, democratic ones that fought side by side through the turbulent 20th century. Margaret Thatcher once said in conversation that she saw part of England’s role as stopping bad ideas on the Continent from jumping across the ocean to us. Perhaps part of our job, in our better years—Silicon Valley 40 years ago, say—was to inspire with an anarchic energy.

So it matters that Britain will have a new prime minister Monday, when the votes of Conservative Party members are announced. The Tory leadership race commenced in July and the winner will almost surely be Foreign Secretary Liz Truss over former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak.

London was bustling when I was there mid-August, full of tourists, restaurants humming, yet every conversation reflected a rising sense of alarm about the future. Inflation had just gone over 10%, huge hikes in household heating bills were forecast due to Vladimir Putin’s energy war on Europe, the National Health Service seemed to be teetering on some new kind of collapse. Everyone seemed to be braced for something.

In America every political conversation quickly devolves into “Trump,” and in London it goes quickly to “Boris.” And how with his gifts, with his cleverness and best-in-a-generation political talent, the prime minister still couldn’t get himself in order and handle the scandals that surrounded him, that he made.

Boris Johnson loomed over the Tory race and in looming muted it. Ballots came in low and slow. People couldn’t make up their minds. Conservatives far from London were roiled: They knew Mr. Johnson had to leave but didn’t like it that he’s gone. He unified the party just three years ago, now it’s all split up again. Neither candidate to replace him seemed his size.

When Mr. Johnson became prime minister I thought I was witnessing the beginning of an era. It turned out to be a moment. As I watched Mr. Sunak and Ms. Truss I thought whoever wins, this is the beginning of a moment, not an era.

Mr. Sunak, 42, in Parliament seven years, is thoughtful, accomplished, knows policy and takes it seriously. He has a clear and cultivated mind. He is unjustly accused of having betrayed Mr. Johnson by resigning from his cabinet. But Mr. Johnson did in Mr. Johnson. Ms. Truss, 47, in Parliament 12 years, and having held similarly impressive posts, is more politically agile, even a bit shape-shifty. A member of Parliament who has taken no public stand on the race saw that as a virtue. “You don’t quite know what she will do, which makes her interesting and perhaps a better fit for the moment.” In Ms. Truss’s unpredictability there may be creativity. In Mr. Sunak’s steadiness people see more of the same.

There are policy differences—she would cut taxes to ignite things; he, worried about inflation, would forgo early cuts to get it under control. When the race was called, Mr. Sunak made a mistake in calling Ms. Truss’s tax cuts “fantasy economics.” It had echoes of 1980, when George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics.” From that moment Ms. Truss was cast as the Reagan figure, and embraced the comparison.

It seemed to me Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, had it best, in July, in the Telegraph, about why Ms. Truss would win. “Almost all people who do, or might ever, vote Conservative have experienced nothing whatever to encourage them since Covid-19 began.” Their taxes are up, savings down, “wokery has insulted their culture.” While I was there the head of recruitment for the Royal Air Force stepped down over race and gender directives.

Mr. Sunak read the Conservatives of Parliament right but Ms. Truss read those on the ground right, and the latter will decide. I think she saw the almost poignant desire of regular Conservatives simply to feel like conservatives again: Reduce taxes, make the government less overbearing, stop the liquid wokeness that keeps rising—you plug the hole here and it comes in there. Can’t we have a few victories that we actually recognize as conservative?

The week she pulled ahead I met Ms. Truss at her campaign offices on Lord North Street. I told her I am a famously bad interviewer because I am embarrassed to ask people questions and put them on the spot, which made us laugh, and we did questions at the start and then off the record. Naturally off the record was the most interesting part. But it was immediately apparent that while Mr. Sunak was out asking for votes, Ms. Truss was planning a government.

Conservatives, she said, must be more confident in their positions. “Profit is a good thing.” “Don’t allow the left to have the high moral ground.” She sloughs off criticism she’s imitating Thatcher. “I admire Margaret Thatcher, I admire Ronald Reagan. I admire Robert Peel.” She defended against charges her policies just play to the base. “I think being popular is a good thing. It’s extraordinary people can say that’s somehow bad.”

I said it was my sense that she had to fight for everything she had, not in a class sense—she is from a middle-class family of the political left—but some other way. She considered this. “I’m not claiming I was in any way disadvantaged.” But yes, “I have always wanted to be in control of my own future. And I want that for others. But I fought hard for my beliefs.”

At a meet-the-candidates event later that evening, Mr. Sunak was greeted with enthusiasm. He is vibratingly eager when he takes a podium, like a Christmas puppy just out of the box. Ms. Truss, who spoke after, was all business, standing with feet apart on a small riser, hands on hips. She enjoyed mixing with the crowd.

The best moment I saw on the hustings came later that evening when, in Q-and-A with an audience, Mr. Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants, was asked about being the ethnic minority in the race. There was a reference to Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century prime minister, who was Jewish. “I can tell you this,” Mr. Sunak said: “Whoever is announced the winner in September it is going to either be the third woman prime minister in British history or the second ethnic minority. Who produced these people? The Conservative Party.”

Mr. Johnson at this time, while London was bracing, was off on a series of vacations. But returning to Britain last week for a goodbye tour he refused to rule out the idea of launching a comeback.

The next two years will be hellacious for his successor. How will he or she survive inflation, fuel prices, the NHS, a weakening pound, the constant air of crisis? And with a split party?

Mr. Johnson will be a parliamentary backbencher, one who knows his gifts, who resents his fall and those who pushed him. Simmering, highly quotable, wanting what’s rightly his . . .

Does this remind you of anyone?

I found myself unshocked by the abortion vote in Kansas, and I don’t understand the shock of others. America has come to poll consistently in favor of abortion in the first trimester with support declining in the second and cratering in the third. The people of Kansas were asked if they’d like to remove any right to abortion from their state constitution and allow their legislators to fashion new laws and limits. They said no by 59% to 41%.

That margin in a conservative state might have been surprising, but not the outcome. The proposal would have looked to voters radical and extreme: We’re going to sweep it away, immediately? It’s all or nothing? And we’re going to hand all our trust to legislators in hopes they’ll be wise? I have never met an American who confused his state representative with a philosopher king.

In Kansas, pro-lifers asked for too much. People don’t like big swerves and lurches, there’s enough anxiety in life. They want to absorb, find a way to trust. Dobbs was decided only six weeks ago.

And those six weeks have been confusing and chaotic. Nationally, the pro-life movement spent 50 years fighting for something and then, once it won, its leaders seemed to go silent or sound defensive. It’s possible they were attempting to be tactful as opposed to triumphalist, but it left a void and foolish people filled it.

No compelling leader has emerged as a new voice. National energies haven’t been scaled down to state activity. Pro-choice forces, galvanized when the Dobbs draft leaked in May, raised money, spent it shrewdly, drew in talent and were pushed by a Democratic Party that thought it finally had a game-changing issue. Pro-lifers didn’t have an overarching strategy. But everything we know about abortion tells us that when you turn it into a question of all or nothing, you’ll likely get nothing. Thoughtful, humane legislation has to be crafted in the states, put forward, argued for.

The pro-life advocates who filled the rhetorical void competed over who could be most hard-line: There should be no exceptions for rape, if it even was rape. There should be no exceptions for the life of the mother, that gives dishonest doctors room to make false claims. Maybe we can jail women for getting abortions.

It was gross, ignorant and extreme. It excited their followers but hurt the cause they supposedly care about. There was an air of misogyny, of hostility to women. It was, unlike the most thoughtful pro-life arguments of the past 50 years, unloving, unprotective and punitive.

People heard it and thought: No, that’s not what we want.

Moderate, reasoned, balanced approaches will appeal to the vast middle. Arguments over whether women should be prosecuted for crossing state lines to get an abortion won’t.

The public face of the pro-life movement looks at the moment loony and vicious. Last Saturday in Florida, Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman and famous idiot, spoke at a student event and said overweight and unappealing women don’t need to fear pregnancy: “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.” A 19-year-old pro-choice activist then drew his mockery by responding on Twitter, and NPR reports that she cannily used the confrontation to raise more than $700,000 for pro-choice causes.

We live in a democracy. The pro-life side rightly asked for a democratic solution to a gnawing national problem. To succeed, they need baseline political skills. You persuade people as to the rightness of your vision. You act and speak in good faith so they trust you. You anticipate mischievous and dishonest representations of where you stand. You highlight them and face them. There has in fact been a lot of misrepresentation of where pro-lifers stand and why, and what their proposals will achieve. You have to clear the air. You can win a lot with candor and good faith. You can impress by being prepared and ready.

Most important, there is a political tradition in democracy that consists of these words: “That’s asking too much.” Don’t ask people for more than they can give. Don’t go too far, don’t lose by asking for a sweeping decision when people will be willing to go step by step. Ask for as much as they can give, pull them toward your vision, but don’t be afraid of going slow and steady, be afraid of overloading the grid. That’s part of what happened in Kansas: They were asked to take a step they thought extreme, and they don’t like extreme.

You have to be clear in explaining how society will arrange itself if you get the measure you asked for. In this case, the pro-life cause, conservatives and the Republican Party have the chance to speak of, laud and increase state and private help for women bearing children in difficult circumstances. The antiabortion movement will never really succeed unless it is paired in the public mind with compassion for the struggling. The Republican Party had the chance to align itself with women. Has it taken it? Or is it too busy talking about “impregnating” those you find unattractive?

Finally, if you are going to be in politics you had better know what your own people are thinking. NBC’s Steve Kornacki noted the morning after the vote that turnout in Kansas was high—276,000 Democrats, 464,000 Republicans and 169,000 unaffiliated voters. The number of votes against the abortion amendment was more than 540,000. That means a lot of Republicans voted no. A lot who identify as conservative and live in deep red areas voted no. You have to know where your own people are and build policy and strategy around it.

Because this is a democracy. Policy is decided by votes. Every loss contains the seeds of victory, every victory the seeds of loss. Nothing is permanent.

This is America working it out. Some states will be extreme in one direction, some in the other. It’s going to be ugly for a while. Sweet reason has seldom been a dominant characteristic of combatants in this fight. Too bad, because in the vast middle there’s a lot of it.

A lot of state decisions will likely come down along lines of where national polling has been—15-week bans, exceptions for rape and the mother’s life. In the end we may wind up where Chief Justice John Roberts would have put us. The idea in his concurring opinion in Dobbs was to maintain a federal right to abortion while finally granting states broad authority in establishing laws and limits that had previously been prohibited by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This approach may have restrained the worst excesses of both sides, removed a sense of alarm and helped ease the country into fewer abortions in a post-Roe, post-Casey world.

The Dobbs decision, though, requires something more immediate: true adults in legislatures of all levels, and activists who are serious and have a sense of democratic give. All who fight for life must think about this and be our best selves. Or we will wind up having won all, and lost all.

Where are we in the office wars? I think there’s an armistice between the return-to-the-office side and the work-from-home forces. Perhaps hostilities will resume in the fall. Bosses are hoping the old reality will snap back as the drama of 2020-22 recedes, that people will start to feel they need to come back, or can be made to. The work-from-home people are dug in, believing they’re on the winning side, that the transformation of work in America, which had been going remote for years, was simply sped up and finalized by the pandemic. In this tight job market they have the upper hand. Employers are fighting for talent: Fire me—I’ll get a better job tomorrow, and you’ll get 50 hours with HR onboarding my replacement. The balance of power will change if the slowing economy leads to layoffs and hiring freezes.

The benefits of working from home are obvious: freedom, no commute; it’s easier to be there for family, the dog, the dentist appointment. Less time wasted in goofy officewide meetings. I’ve wondered if there is another aspect, that office life was demystified by what began in the years before the pandemic, the rise of HR complaints and accusations of bullying, bad language and sexual misconduct. Add arguments over masks and vaccines, and maybe office life came to be seen less as a healthy culture you could be part of and more like a battlefield you wanted to avoid.

Arguments against working from home are largely intangible, and I focus on these. They are less personal, more national and societal.

I don’t want to see office life in America end. The decline in office life is going to have an impact on the general atmosphere of the country. There is something demoralizing about all the empty offices, something post-greatness about them. All the almost-empty buildings in all the downtowns—it feels too much like a metaphor for decline.

My mind goes first to the young. People starting out need offices to learn a profession, to make friends, meet colleagues, find romantic partners and mates. The #MeToo movement did a lot to damage mentoring—senior employees no longer wanted to take the chance—but the end of office life would pretty much do away with it.

There will be less knowledge of the workplace, of what’s going on, of the sense that you’re part of a burbling ecosystem. There will be fewer deep friendships, antagonisms, real and daily relationships. Work will seem without depth, flat as a Zoom screen. Less human. Without offices you’ll lose a place to escape from your home life.

My guess is the end of the office will lead to a decline in professionalism across the board. You learn things in the hall from the old veteran. You understand she’s watching your progress, and you want to come through with your excellence. Without her down the hall, who will you be excellent for?

There will likely, in each company and organization, be a decline in a sense of mission. A diluting of company spirit looks to me inevitable. Spirit, mission—they come from people and are established and imparted through being together, sharing a particular space, talking to each other spontaneously and privately, encouraging and correcting.

At some point in the 20th century, America invented big-scale office life. We were the envy of the world for it. Without it there will be less bubbling creativity, less of the chance meeting in the hall and the offhand comment that results in brains sparking off brains.

Companies may seem more communal, in a way—Zoom screens aren’t explicitly hierarchical. But there will be less clarity, and less leadership. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, who has said he wants people back in the office and experienced pushback for it, just stated in his annual report that people with ambition “cannot lead from behind a desk or in front of a screen.”

It is possible working at home is changing the nature of professional ambition. A piece last month in the Journal by Callum Borchers cited Jonathan Johnson, CEO of Overstock.com. To foster a sense of togetherness and shared mission, he invited everyone on staff to join him for lunch every Tuesday at the company’s Midvale, Utah, headquarters. In eight months, a total of 10 people attended. “Most of the time, I eat my peanut butter sandwich alone,” Mr. Johnson told Mr. Borchers, “When I was 25, if I had a chance to eat my sandwich with the CEO, I’d have been there.”

We’re pro-ambition in this space: God gave you gifts, bring them fruitfully into the world, rise and make things better. Then again maybe this age is making people ambitious for different things.

Here are my two greatest concerns. The first is that in my lifetime the office is where America happened each day. That’s why many of our most popular TV programs were about the office, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” through “Mad Men,” from “ER” through “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation.” You can name others. Even “M*A*S*H” was about the workplace. And of course “The Office.” Without Dunder Mifflin, how would Jim have met Pam? How could the utterly ridiculous Michael Scott have entered your sympathies without seeing him every day, and knowing him?

The primary location of daily integration in America—the coming together of all ages, religions, ethnicities and political tendencies, all colors, classes and conditions—has been, during the past century, the office. It is where you learn to negotiate relationships with people very different from you, where you discover what people with different experiences of life really think. You discern all this in the joke, the aside, the shared confidence, the rolled eyes. And with all this variety you manage to come together in a shared, formal mission: Get that account, sell that property, get the story, process those claims.

Daily life in America happened in the office. If it doesn’t, where will America happen?

And, this being a political column, my second worry. The end of the office will contribute to polarization. Receding from office life will become another way of self-segregating. People will be exposed to less and, in their downtime, will burrow down into their sites, their groups, their online angers. Their group-driven information and facts.

I suppose what I fear is a more disembodied nation. You can see it on the TV news—the empty, echoing set where there used to be people at desks in the background, running around. You see it in big offices when you go to see an accountant or a travel agent. There is no there there.

Disembodied isn’t good. This fall and winter I hope we see the buildings full and the people going in and out. I want the center of our cities to hum and thrum again.

I don’t want America to look like an Edward Hopper painting. He was the great artist of American loneliness—empty streets, tables for one, everyone at the bar drinking alone. We weren’t meant to be a Hopper painting. We were meant to be and work together.

We’re in the midst of breath-catching revolutions in how America lives and works. Working from home, as an issue, is still shaking itself out, but its implications are huge. If an entire class of people who used to go to the office stay home, it will upend the commuter model on which modern cities are built, and on which they depend for revenue.

Another great question has to do with the shortage of workers. You see this all around you. There aren’t enough people to fill available jobs.

Retailers big and small struggle to find and retain employees. Beaches and pools can’t find lifeguards. Police forces can’t find young men and women to apply. The U.S. Army can’t find recruits. Doctors offices strain to fill a job when somebody leaves. Airlines are so short-staffed there’s no one to help you find luggage that’s been lost for two weeks. There’s no one to keep it from being lost. The other night a Midwestern city official told CNN, of the struggle to hire cops, “It’s like the American workforce vanished.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a report, “Understanding America’s Labor Shortage,” by Stephanie Ferguson. The chamber, she writes, hears every day from members “of every size and industry, across nearly every state” that they face unprecedented challenges trying to fill jobs. There are more than 11 million job openings in the U.S. but only six million unemployed workers.

So what’s happening? At the height of the pandemic more than 120,000 businesses temporarily closed, but the economy bounced back and in 2021 added an “unprecedented” 3.8 million jobs. But 3.25 million Americans have left the workforce—labor-force participation among Americans 16 and older is 62.2%, down from 63.4% in February 2020.

Several factors are at work. The chamber notes that Americans have added $4 trillion to their savings accounts since early 2020. They had more money and less to spend it on, thanks to “enhanced unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and not being able to go out.” The extra few hundred dollars a week from enhanced unemployment “led to 68% of claimants earning more on unemployment than they did while working.” But enhanced unemployment ended in September 2021.

Difficulty finding good child care also keeps some from the workplace. During the pandemic a lot of child-care providers closed up or scaled back. A lot of working mothers left their jobs during the pandemic and apparently chose not to return. The labor-force participation rate for working mothers went from around 70% to 55% and hasn’t fully snapped back.

Part of the overall story is the phrase that’s entered the language, “the Great Resignation,” which started in the fall of 2020. Workers, especially but not only the young, began quitting their jobs in hope of better conditions or opportunities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021. Much of that was pandemic-related: Hiring was coming back, workers suddenly held the cards, a historic event was unfolding: Why not use it to re-evaluate your priorities? For some it has really worked out. Pew Research reported in March 2022: “Those who quit and are now employed elsewhere are more likely than not to say their current job has better pay, more opportunities for advancement and more work-life balance and flexibility.”

Fortune this week reported the Great Resignation isn’t something that happened, it’s happening. The magazine cites a global survey of full-time employees and self-employed workers conducted for Microsoft, which found 41% “are considering leaving their current employer this year” and another, done by McKinsey, which put the figure at 40% in the next three to six months. Bonnie Dowling, a co-author of the McKinsey report, told CNBC: “There’s been a fundamental shift in workers’ mentality, and their willingness to prioritize other things in their life beyond whatever job they hold.”

Pretty much all the reports and research I’ve seen suggest that a lot of people experienced the pandemic as an opportunity to change not only their jobs but their lives. Some quit jobs to create new businesses—the Census Bureau reported nearly 5.4 million new-business applications in 2021, up from the previous record of 4.4 million in 2020. Some want to be more present for their families.

The shock of the pandemic prompted reflection. Stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment helped make big personal change possible.

At the Harvard Business Review, Joseph Fuller and William Kerr wrote this spring that the Great Resignation was an “unprecedented mass exit” but also the reversion to a long-term trend, one we’re “likely to be contending with for years to come.” Quit rates have been rising steadily for a long time. When the pandemic first hit, workers held onto their jobs for fear of layoffs and recession. But by 2021 stimulus money hit the system and uncertainty abated. That’s when the Great Resignation hit. “We’re now back in line with the pre-pandemic trend.”

It isn’t only the young. Part of the story of job-leaving in America has to do with early retirement. “In 2021, older workers left their jobs at an accelerated rate, and they did so at younger ages.” They felt able to do so because their houses were suddenly worth more, they had retirement accounts, and they were afraid of getting sick.

There are good things in what we’re seeing. Workers, especially those in lower skilled jobs, have increased leverage—feeling more valued, able to demand good treatment and better salaries. More mothers who want to stay home with their kids feel able to do so. But there are also causes for concern. The unfilled jobs look to be setting the perfect historical circumstance to usher in a new rise of the robots. And it means something that there are many who’d like to join the Army but can’t meet its mental- and physical-health requirements, for reasons including obesity.

Which gets us to Mene Ukueberuwa’s January interview in the Journal with the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Eberstadt notes that recent workforce changes follow a postwar pattern. Usually after recessions, male labor-force participation drops, and when the recession ends it ticks up, “but never gets back to where it was.” Labor-force participation for both sexes, he notes, peaked in 2000 at 67%. We’re now 5 points lower than that.

The work rate for those in their prime working years, 25 to 54, has been declining since the turn of the century. The economic implications are obvious—slower growth, less expansion—and the personal implications are dire. “By and large, nonworking men don’t ‘do’ civil society,” Mr. Eberstadt says. They stay home watching screens—videogames, social-media sites and streaming services. There is something “fundamentally degrading” in this, and Mr. Ebestadt refers to an “archipelago of disability programs” that help make not working possible.

Staying apart, estranged from life and not sharing a larger mission can create “really tragic long term consequences,” Mr. Eberstadt says. These young people aren’t taking chances, leaving a job to start a small business. They aren’t finding themselves. They aren’t even looking.